The global energy demand is rising sharply with the growth of the world economy and increase in energy consumption per capita. Utility companies are not able to swell their generation capacity according to this accelerated demand. This lack of power generation leads to peak time outages and blackouts which are common nowadays in the developing nations. This will in effect create a major barrier to the nation’s economic stability and growth. In India, the demanded electric power exceeds the generated electric power, especially during peak hours. This is mainly due to the lack of enough power generation, losses in transmission and poor load management mechanisms in the existing power grid. Other major problems faced by the Indian power grid are the power theft, inefficient line fault detection method and careless energy usage by the consumers due to unawareness. Furthermore, large scale integration of renewable energy sources is impossible without effective management by efficient energy production forecasting and by real-time monitoring of energy consumption.
Since the large-scale integration of renewable energy to the power grid is utilised to electrify a wide area, it will not make the power grid self-sustainable. This issue can be alleviated by implementing multiple regionally limited electrical grids called ‘micro-grid’ patches to electrify the wide area. A micro-grid is a local energy system consisting of distributed renewable energy sources, storage and loads, capable of operating in parallel with, or independently from, the main electricity grid. The primary purpose is to ensure a reliable, affordable energy supply for consumers. Benefits of micro-grids that extend to the community at large include lower greenhouse gas emissions, higher security of supply and lower stress on the transmission and distribution system. By careful coordination of loads and micro-generation the aggregated local distribution network sub-system or ‘micro-grid’ can attain self-sustainability in terms of energy and can stay a long time in autonomous mode. Thus the micro-grid patches create a self-sustainable distribution power grid. This in turn maximises the utilisation of the renewable energy sources and minimises the use of energy resources such as biomass and fossil fuels thereby decrease the CO2 emissions.
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